Judge and fury

January 23 2003By Oliver Burkeman

In some ways, things haven't changed much for Judith Sheindlin since the 1980s, when she was the senior judge at New York's deeply troubled Family Court. "Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining!" she would famously rasp at the procession of juvenile delinquents, deadbeat dads and drug-addicted mothers who shuffled through the city's then near-paralysed judicial system.

"Nobody goes out and sells crack because Grandma died! Get a better story!"

Since 1996, Sheindlin has been dispensing justice, not from a conventional courtroom, but from a television studio mocked up to resemble one. Judge Judy - the show in which real-life litigants bring their genuine disputes for swift and usually merciless judgment - has been so staggeringly successful that she has just signed a new contract guaranteeing her $US25 million-a-year ($A42.5 million) for the next four years.

The deal makes her one of the best-paid performers in TV history, outdoing Oprah Winfrey. It also compares rather well to the salary of, say, a New York Supreme Court judge, which is $US136,700.

The stunning success of Judge Judy, and shows like it - more than seven million people tune in to each of her weekday shows - is a phenomenon apart. "I think that watching my courtroom, hopefully you get a sense of the fact that the law is supposed to be based on common sense - people enjoy seeing those folks (who are) trying to put something over them put in their place," she said. ");document.write("

"She was a model judge with the highest of intelligence, the greatest judicial demeanour," says Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York, who appointed Sheindlin to the Family Court, and served a brief spell himself in the 1990s as a TV judge on People's Court, a rival show.

The courtroom reality show certainly wasn't Judge Judy's idea: from the 1950s, the much more sober divorce court hauled feuding couples on to television and meted out the blame, until no-fault divorces came along and it became a casualty of progress. But Sheindlin's acerbic manner was like electric-shock treatment on a tired format.

Sheindlin has embraced the celebrity lifestyle with alacrity. According to the New York Post, she has been spending her millions recently on a Mercedes convertible, diamonds, and a country estate in Connecticut with tennis courts, a golf course and a team of armed guards.

Her methods have appalled Judge Joseph Wapner, the kindly veteran of People's Court. "She is not portraying a judge as I view a judge should act," he told reporters earlier this year. "She's discourteous, and she's abrasive. She's not slightly insulting - she's insulting in capital letters."

Sheindlin played it icily. "I don't know where, or by whom, Judge Wapner was raised, but my parents taught me, when you don't have something nice to say about someone, say nothing," she said.

The litigants may be real litigants, and the cases real cases - often referred up by mutual consent from the small claims court - but one thing is not: the penalty. The courtroom shows don't crow about it, but the damages awarded to aggrieved parties come from the coffers of the production companies. Verdicts are made binding through the contracts the participants sign when they agree to take part - they can't, most importantly, take the cases on to appeal in the real courts - but with nothing to lose personally and payment for appearing whether they win or not, they would be unlikely to want to.

Judge Judy, on the other hand, conveys the impression that she would relish being given back her former power to hand out custodial sentences: "A period in a chilly upstate facility," she once said, "can be a great attitude adjuster."

It was a profile in the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that led to Sheindlin's career move from New York to Hollywood. "Sheindlin packs a verbal wallop that can stun the unwary," reporter Josh Getlin wrote. "Woe to the poorly prepared attorney who wanders into her court, or the punk in Reeboks who thinks he can pull a fast one on the woman in black.

"She gives them all a thrashing to remember, sounding more like Shirley MacLaine with a gavel than some run-of-the-mill judge."

The blurred boundary between real-life law and the TV courtroom also proved useful for Jerry Sheindlin, Judy's husband, who was a judge before he joined People's Court.

Ed Koch found his experience as New York mayor a less useful preparation for television. "I was never a huge success as a TV judge", he concedes. "I mean, I held my own. But I conducted myself as I thought a judge should conduct himself in a courtroom."

One suspects that the job may have begun to get to Koch when he was faced with a plaintiff complaining about being injured by the breasts of a dancer at a topless club. "He said he got a neck sprain," Koch says. "My recollection is that I found for the woman."

After a couple of years, the former mayor became a former TV judge; Sheindlin, though, goes from strength to strength, and her shows are seen in Australia (Channel 10, 1pm weekdays) and in the UK.

It is voyeuristic entertainment, of course, but compared to the unfettered voyeurism of the talk-shows - Jerry Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael and the rest - Judge Judy does seem to offer something: closure, resolution, and a personal-responsibility moral it is hard to object to very strongly.

These days, at the height of her TV success, Judge Judy, one imagines, would have little time for the lawyers' technicalities, their nitpicking insistence on the rule of law, their attempt to phrase more judiciously the rampant anger of their clients.

This was not really her style when she had to deal with them, and it is certainly not her style now. "I'm gonna send you so far upstate your mother'll need a passport to come visit you!" she is reported to have informed one hapless defendant in New York.

"When my mouth is moving," she is fond of saying, "it means that you need to be quiet. And, sir - don't you see my mouth still moving?"